1. Field of the Invention
The present disclosure generally relates to information processing and, more particularly, to an information processing apparatus, a system including a printing apparatus and an information processing apparatus, a control method of the system, and a storage medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, a method has been known which determines a usage ratio of each color, namely yellow (Y), magenta (M), and cyan (C) on each page in job data as a print result of a printing apparatus and records as a print log of the job data by determining a counter of color and monochromatic pages (Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2002-91743).
As a specific exemplary application, a method for counting up a counter at a plurality of stages according to an area (ratio) of color data in a page has been known with respect to the counter of a color page of the above-described print log. More specifically, the counter counts up at three stages in such a manner that it is regarded as “full color” if a color data area is 80% or more, as “middle color” if the color data area is 79% to 21%, and as “low color” if the color data area is 20% or less. Accordingly, a charging system can be realized which is capable of charging an appropriate fee according to a size of a color area though the same in color pages.
Further, a method has been known which records a determination result of a usage ratio of colors on each page to the printing apparatus in addition to the above-described print log. In this method, the determination result is recorded for confirming, in detail per page, how the determination is made to perform the counting recorded in the print log.
In addition, a method has been known which collects, from a host computer, print log information of job data recorded in a printing apparatus and stores the information in a predetermined server apparatus (Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2000-112706).
However, the above-described conventional systems do not consider a method for managing a print log and a determination result of a color usage ratio of each page by a plurality of host computers accessing a printing apparatus. In this regard, a capacity for storing information is limited in the printing apparatus, and all information pieces cannot be recorded unlimitedly.
A printing apparatus has realized various printing modes, such as outputting job data from a plurality of host computers, directly reading a paper document and outputting as a copy by the printing apparatus, and outputting facsimile (FAX) data received by the printing apparatus. Therefore, a method is required which enables a plurality of host computers to efficiently and certainly obtain a print log and a determination result of a color usage ratio of each page and manage them with respect to all outputs.
Generally, an area reserved for storing a determination result of a color usage ratio in a printing apparatus is often smaller than an area for storing a print log. Therefore, regarding a determination result of a color usage ratio of each page, an older determination result is often overwritten when records of the determination results are over a predetermined number (upper limit) of the printing apparatus. In such a system, when the overwritten determination result of job data is to be confirmed, it is necessary to print the same job data again for the confirmation, and thus resources, such as working hours and sheets are wasted.